01
Battle For SurvivalDistinguishing the people was more difficult than I expected. Where the hell were they?
I raced down the halls of an abandoned hospital in hopes to discover others that could aid my escape. Some part of my mind doubted that people would be surviving here, the ripped curtains, the smeared substances on the floors, the crooked picture frames, were evidence. The pictures in their frames had multiple holes through them.
"What in the world happened here?" I whispered as I entered a room. A nursery to be exact.
The cribs that once held babies to incubate them, were sprawled across the room along with broken glass. The men had already searched in this building, I was safe for now.
Blood traced around the shards that were distributed across the floor. What do they do to people, crack their skulls against the windows and rubbed their wounds on the floors to warn the other who hid?
"Damn," I bent down to get a closer view to what was in the corner. "They even killed an innocent kitty, what a shame." The carcass, drenched in it's own blood, was wedged in between the wall and the cabinet.
I was crouching, getting ready to fully stand until a foreign object pressed against my sweaty skin. A barrel to the side of my head, I was caught, I wasn't cautious enough; I was more worried about a deceased animal than my life that was still able to be used.
"Who are you?" A raspy voice spoke. I couldn't tell if it was either a guy's or girl's but turning around to face who it was wasn't in my plans, unless I wanted my head blown into bits.
"Z?" I asked, shifting my eyes to gaze through my peripheral vision.
"Thank God, I finally found someone." The owner of the voice breathed in relief. The barrel disappeared from my presence but the ghostly feel it left made an illusion in my mind, fogging it and making me believe that it was still ready to fire into my temple.
"Who are you?" I inquired. I managed to brush some of the dirt I marked my pants with earlier to camouflage myself. I needed new strategies besides hiding in a shrub, on the ground, laying with the insects, and waiting for the guard's feet to carry them far away from where I was. Not very wise coming from myself.
"Just another Z, names aren't important." I focused my attention towards the voice that was speaking to me, I realized it was a boy, possibly younger than I was but I highly doubted it; I was barely sixteen.
"Age?" He asked, leaving the room to enter another chamber across the hall. He expected for me to follow to him, so I did. I exited the room, quickly giving the dimly lit hallway a second glance, the men were invading each building of the city, I had nowhere to run to except the buildings they already have checked.
"Fifteen, what's it to you?"
"Ah, we're fresh meat to them. They usually start with the fifteen-year-olds." The boy was lifting scraps of tin and aluminum sheets, seeing if this room contained anything valuable or something productive we could use. "Seventeen, not that big of a difference, right?"
"Wait, why do they want the younger?"
"They're newer, it's like they are most useful. I mean, they aren't going to use an eighty-year-old lady. We have more agility, strength. Basically we don't have problems, we're healthy."
"That's whacked up," I said. Soaking all of the information to section it with the fragments of ruling I acknowledge was difficult. Their ruling was to preserve our rights, to protect us from anything that stands in our way, yet they come around to kidnap their people.
So much for protection, I thought.
"It's strange for them to do this when, back then, they knew about people like us." He stood, brushed his dusted hands on his black pants, and rose towards me. He held out his hand, to shake it, I carefully slid mine into his. I shouldn't act as carefree like that, I didn't know what he was capable of doing, or if he was one of those people; the men. I quickly reclaimed my hand the moment it stuck out, hugging it to myself, shielding my body from him.
"Frightened, huh? Well, I'm Archer, but most people call me Arch." Archer awkwardly pulled his arm back, resting by his side.
"I'm Rosalie, but my family used to call me Rosy since my cheeks were always red," I stated. I wasn't planning on giving him any more information of my personal life, as to where I lived, where I came from, who I truly was. All he needed to know that I was a Z and he was one too.
"Are we just going to stand here or actually look for something to eat?" I asked, obviously annoyed of my hunger. I've been in a state of starvation that I would see hallucinations, it would drive me to the edge of insanity until I finally decided to rest. It wasn't an intelligent idea to do, sleep in the wide open but I had no other choice.
"What do you think I was doing?" Archer said, exiting the room we were in and sauntered into the hallway that chained off the main one. "Come on."
The boy picked up his pace from walking to a jog, down the hall. He halted before a closed door, possibly a room to that was concealed from the public, but from my perspective, it seemed like the men didn't search through that door.
"This is where I have been staying," Archer said, unlocking the door with a key that was departed from the pocket of his shorts. "I managed to hide from them just in time."
The door opened slowly at first, he was pulling the key out of the lock, then it creaked open to reveal what was inside.
"Here?" I pointed somewhere in the space of the room. "It's more like royalty compared to the rest of this place."
"Yeah, I cleaned up." He lead me inside, making sure to keep me in his range of sight, and tightly closed the door behind me. "I gathered as many thing I could over the past days." Archer said as he brushed gracefully passed my shoulder, he had a lean body that could carry him quicker than the bulkier men with raging muscles.
"How.. Nice." I scoped out the hidden part of the room that was shadowed from the lightbulb above, could he be hiding something?
"Here," he stated, handing me a can of corn. By the way he had canned and perishable foods, I could detect he was intelligent, one of the honors student.
"Thank you." The can was already pried open, showing all of the contents inside; the corn swimming in it's liquid. The jagged edges around the can told me that he used some type of sharp object to pry the lid off, maybe a handy pocket knife.
My father, when I was just a toddler, feared that this type of day would happen, a day where the Z's would be taken away from their society, so he knew that his only option besides fleeing was to give me a weapon to defend myself; his pocket knife. The initials, KL, once was engraved on the shimmering blade, but as the years passed, and continuous washing, the blade has dulled and the initials were beginning to fade. I didn't have any clue to what those letters represented since my father's name was Tryce, and my mother's name was probably nothing close. I don't remember much of my mother anymore, not after she was kidnapped, but what I did recall was that her appearances were handed down to me. People always used to comment on how I looked just like her, but I never saw what they did. My nose, thin and small, was more like my father's. My eyes, rounded, wide, and curious, were identical to my younger bother's. My lips, full and rich, came from God knows where. I was nothing like my mother appearance wise, but there was one characteristic we shared; blood. She once was a Z like myself.
"Men. One o'clock." Archer whispered. "Stand back."
I stepped closer into the wall, hopefully I could sink in and hide from them for sure. I wasn't able to outrun those guards, they were trained for endurance just like my father informed me. I was too exhausted to run and be chased than I already have been, my calf muscles burned; I could barely even walk without having a noticeable limp.
"Z's? Where are you?" One of the guards made clicking sounds, ones similar that someone would use towards a horse. "Come out." He taunted.
I wasn't prepared to confront a bullet in the head or experimentation. I was still so young to deal with this tormenting.
A thought came into mind as the both of us stood as still as the wind. They probably captured my father and little brother, beating them with the bloody ends of their whips, forcing the information to fall off their lips. They couldn't give me up, they're my only family, they would want the best for me and that is to survive this recession of killings. I could only imagine what they did with the kidnapped citizens and Z's. Tying them shamelessly on chains that were bolted to the walls, zapping them with futuristic devices that weren't suppose to be exposed to society, or slicing their skin with the sharp tip of a knife. I would crawl on hands and knees to search for them, they were my life.
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